Going all the way with LBJ
Around noon on Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, almost exactly 24 hours after the assassination in Dallas, while the president’s casket lay in the East Room of the White House, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kennedy’s kept historian, convened a lunch at Washington’s Occidental restaurant with some other administration liberals. Their purpose was to discuss how to deny the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination to the new incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, and instead run a ticket of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Sen. Hubert Humphrey.
This example of the malignant malice of some liberals against the president who became 20th-century liberalism’s most consequential adherent is described in Robert Caro’s “The Passage of Power,” the fourth and, he insists, penultimate volume in his “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” which when completed will rank as America’s most ambitiously conceived, assiduously researched and compulsively readable political biography. The new volume arrives 30 years after the first, and its timing is serendipitous: Are you seeking an antidote to current lamentations about the decline of political civility? Immerse yourself in Caro’s cringe-inducing catalogue of humiliations, gross and petty, inflicted on Johnson by many New Frontiersmen and, with obsessive hatred, by Robert Kennedy.
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lbj and his entire family, that includes wife, are really slug slimes, IMO!
Hubby was in Nam and can tell what that bunch did seeing to it they made millions with their companies!
L
letget on April 28, 2012 at 4:53 PM
Darn, I thought it was going to be an article about prince puppy muncher resigning..
“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” Benjamin Franklin
Chip on April 28, 2012 at 5:00 PM
I am looking forward to this book. I have read the first three and while I don’t agree with Caro on some points they are great reading and well researched history. Anybody who is interested in politics should read these books.
kurtd on April 28, 2012 at 5:08 PM
“I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” — Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One according Ronald Kessler’s Book, “Inside The White House” .
Mimzey on April 28, 2012 at 5:11 PM
Only time I saw the license plate with LBJ and a facsimile of ‘Aunt Jemima’ was in Florida at a gift shop back in the summer of 1964. On it was written, “I went all the way with LBJ.”
Kermit on April 28, 2012 at 5:21 PM
Democrat President LBJ + Halliburton = “Good” to the Left.
Democrat pResident Bill Clinton giving Halliburton no-bid contracts during his own War of Choice in the Balkans = “Not a Problem”.
Democrat pResident O’bama gives Halliburton a no-bid contract in Iraq = “Scrub any mention of it in the media”. They did.
Republican Dick Cheney + Halliburton = “War Crimes”.
Del Dolemonte on April 28, 2012 at 5:28 PM
A couple of years ago, an interesting LBJ 1964 campaign ad was unearthed by some bloggers. It totally ignores the fact that Goldwater integrated the AZ National Guard long before Democrat President Harry Truman integrated the US military, but facts are irrelevant when there is an election to be stolen…
“KKK for Goldwater.”
Del Dolemonte on April 28, 2012 at 5:34 PM
Whoa, TMI, TMI. I don’t care how well his pants were creased, just – just no, let’s just not have this discussion.
RINO in Name Only on April 28, 2012 at 5:40 PM
The WaPo Comments do not disappoint.
(Too bad that LBJ never said that-Otto von Bismarck did!)
Del Dolemonte on April 28, 2012 at 5:48 PM
50 down. 150 to go. Keep hope alive!
By the way, peripherally on-topic, Harry Stein’s new book “No Matter What, They’ll Call This Book Racist” is a MUST read.
Rixon on April 28, 2012 at 6:02 PM
I hope Caro has made a lot of money on these books, because no one will be reading them a hundred years from now. In the future, people will laugh at those today that admire the likes of a Johnson or Bush.
rickv404 on April 28, 2012 at 6:59 PM
Let us not forget that LBJ’s SecDef came up with a windfall draft plan. So as to not have a services wide, coast to coast Activation of Guard and Reserve units, who vote!
McNamara’s 100,000.
The overall lowering of standards that brought in countless young men. Just smart enough to sign their own death warrants in the jungles, mountains and swamps of Southeast Asia.
Jack Deth on April 28, 2012 at 8:04 PM